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Pen Lab Help!

Hi Guys,
Im looking to build a small pen lab just to practice at home, what would be the best way of doing this, I've heard you can either set up VM's on a computer and use that and the second way is to have 2 computers one is the victim the other the attacker.

which ways do you guys work and which way do you think would be best for me.

I currently have an imac, but im looking to get a laptop soon.

Should i run 2 VMs 1)backtrack and 2) windows7?
or should get a laptop(which i should be getting anyway) and buy a cheap PC?

Also my concern with running 2 VMS how do i get them to connect to each other so i can try stuff like metasploit?

Re: Pen Lab Help!

Hello mate, I hope I can help you with my example. I have my laptop With Win7, Backtrack 5 and Ubuntu 11.10. On Win7 partition i have installed VMWare, in VMWare i have 4 VMs: Win7 (to play around without mess with my documents), BackTrack 5 R1, CentOS and Windows XP. I also have my old computer with Windows Vista and Windows XP on dualboot.

Technically its the same. Since I share the hosts IP on my VMs, this is like the host works as a Router and the VMs are in a new network. This configuration is made by VMWare you don't need to bother with that.

For example I have my incorporated Wireless antenna and a USB Wireless Antenna. Sometimes with VMWare i connect one my USB Antenna to BT5 VirtualMachine and the incorporated Antenna on the "Victim Machine". And play around with wireless attacks and somethings like that.

My point is, by using any of those methods I don't have any problem, so perhaps you should choose the method that suits you the most. Both work really good.

Re: Pen Lab Help!

My setup is very similar to what strakar described. Specifically, I use VMWare Workstation, and run a number of virtual machines: BT, Metasploitable, Win XP, and Ubuntu. By setting the network adapter on each of these VMs to "host-only", they can talk to each other, but not to the wider network. This makes a great sandbox area in which to experiment. If you do use VMWare, don't forget about the snapshot feature. This will save you a reinstall, if you mess up one of your VMs.

strakar, I like the idea of your 2 wireless antenna setup...gotta try that

If I could figure out how to scuba dive & hack at the same time, there would be nothing I couldn't do...

Re: Pen Lab Help!

Originally Posted by strakar

For example I have my incorporated Wireless antenna and a USB Wireless Antenna. Sometimes with VMWare i connect one my USB Antenna to BT5 VirtualMachine and the incorporated Antenna on the "Victim Machine". And play around with wireless attacks and somethings like that.

Beware that not all computers (very few actually) have the "ability" to use their internal card as a USB card on VMWare. As far as I know, only laptops from the project "e-escolas" can do this (in someway, it must be cheaper to build them like that).

For those of you who don't know it, "e-escolas" is a project in Portugal where every children and teenager can get a cheap laptop (150€ or less) and mobile internet access, trough his school. The project is supported by the portuguese government.

Re: Pen Lab Help!

My internal card is a little bit slow in "airmon-ng start ..." but after it gets to monitor mode it works really great. I use a Realtek RTL8187B but normally as the victim card, and then a bought a USB antenna, TP-LINK TL-WN722N which is more often the attacker.

Re: Pen Lab Help!

I had that setup (internal wireless card rtl8187b, external AWUS036H) on my old Toshiba (L40-15G, e-escolas). But then I switched the internal card to a Intel with wireless N. It never worked again as a USB adapter.
Fortunately I had some other USB wireless cards to play with (TP-Link 321G & 422G, really nice devices).

Re: Pen Lab Help!

Re: Pen Lab Help!

My setup is a bit different since I have BT 5 64 bit as my main OS (On a Core I3 laptop w/8 Gigs ram and 320 Gig HD) and setup small VMs of Windows 7 (32 bit) and XP (32 bit). I have a Macbook with a Win 7 VM that I use for my Zune,Police scanners, and printing any thing needed since I haven't been able to get print drivers working with BT 5.